Photo by Ken LennoxTurkish
born Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of U.S.-based Chobani Inc., was
named the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 at an
awards ceremony in Monte Carlo on June 8.
After
the hardship of covering the World Entrepreneur of the Year competition
in Monaco last week, I took a few days to recharge on the Italian
Riviera. Occasionally, I thought back to some of the entrepreneurs I’d
met and the stories I’d heard. And then, sitting on the breakwater of a
sleepy little Italian port, watching the fishing boats bob up and down, I
had an epiphany.
Canadian entrepreneurs have to get a lot smarter, stronger, and more global. Fast.
We’ve enjoyed privileged access to the U.S. market for years. But other parts of the world are now growing faster, and it’s no longer enough to be big in Buffalo or Boise. New, fast-growing entrepreneurial companies in Europe, Asia and South America are putting global markets into their business plans, and some of them are gunning for you.
In Monaco, I paid special attention to attendees from non-traditional business markets. I met with entrepreneurs from China, Estonia and the Czech Republic (in addition to Canada and Britain), because I was eager to learn how capitalism and entrepreneurship have sprung from Communist roots.
What I learned is that innovation is not confined to Canada and the United States, and that new ideas and breakthrough customer service can come to life anywhere in the world. This is important, because many Canadians assume the only thing developing markets have going for them is low costs. That’s no longer true, and there’s a growing cadre of ambitious entrepreneurs who can leverage value-added innovations and service on top of their low-wage advantage — a one-two punch that will become increasingly lethal as these young firms gain confidence and global clout.
Here’s a quick recap of some of the entrepreneurs I met.
— Dr. Ma Weihua had a promising career as a mandarin at China’s central bank when he decided to take an entrepreneurial flyer. He took over management of China Merchants Bank, which had the advantage of being one step removed from state ownership. Starting with one branch in 1999, he built mainland China’s sixth largest commercial bank, with assets north of $500-billion.
How’d he do it? Unlike most of his state-owned rivals, he asked, what would customers like us to do? As a result, he pioneered in online banking, credit cards, wealth management, and even small-business lending. He’s just now retiring, because he thinks the bank should be run by younger people who understand today’s mobile consumers.
— Frantisek Piskanin was working on a collective farm in the Czech Republic when its Communist government imploded in 1989. He now runs one of central Europe’s largest transportation and logistics companies, HOPI sro, with 3,300 employees. He carved his own path from the beginning; when he was hired by German retailer Tengelmann to facilitate the company’s imports into the Czech Republic, he confidently told the company that Czechs wanted to buy Czech goods, and began sourcing them on his client’s behalf. HOPI’s value-add services include taking control of clients’ inventory, from point of production to store shelf, and revolutionizing the meat industry by building new freezer facilities across Central Europe. He explains his customer-first strategy very succinctly; “We try to understand customers’ needs and bring them new solutions they had no idea could exist.”
— In Estonia, as you read in last week’s column, medical doctor Ruth Oltjer built a successful cleaning supplies and cosmetics firm, Chemi-Pharm. Chemi-Pharm began as a means to import less allergenic cleaning products from the U.K. following Communism’s fall, but is now a manufacturer that exports 50% of its production. Oltjer is eyeing markets in Asia and Western Europe, and is in talks with Mexico, which she hopes will lead to a frontal assault on North America.
— Even the 2013 World Entrepreneur of the Year fits the category of unlikely global entrepreneurs. Hamdi Ulukaya was born in Eastern Turkey and moved to the United States to learn English and study business. He ended up buying an unwanted Kraft cheese plant in upstate New York and revamping it to produce strained Greek yogurt. The Chobani brand has come from nowhere to be the No. 1 yogurt in the U.S.
But Ulukaya is just getting started. He has bought a factory in Australia and plans to enter the U.K. and Western Europe markets when a facility becomes available (finding the right plant is “an opportunistic thing,” he says). You may be interested to know Ulukaya first tried to build a plant in Canada. He found the perfect site and started drawing up plans, he says regulations prevented him from moving forward.
Ironic. While Canada holds on to protectionist rules, the rest of the world is charging forward.
These entrepreneurs may be the best of the best. But I’m betting there will be many more like them, bursting out of every corner of the world, driven by an urge to succeed and a vision of how different markets could be.
Are Canadian entrepreneurs ready for this kind of competition? Do they possess the vision to see things as they could be, not as they are? Do they have the courage to create what Piskanin calls “massive long-term savings” for their customers? Are they as committed to innovation as Dr. Ma, who stepped down because he thinks in-depth customer understanding is the most important asset a company has?
Entrepreneurs across the globe are thinking bigger and seeing further. To join them, you have to ask:
What could your business be? How could it leverage its key strengths to create massive value? What adjacent markets (products or geography) could you expand into? To quote Piskanin one more time, “If you don’t grow, you die.”
I’m not sure how many Canadian entrepreneurs really believe that. But they had better start, and soon.
We’ve enjoyed privileged access to the U.S. market for years. But other parts of the world are now growing faster, and it’s no longer enough to be big in Buffalo or Boise. New, fast-growing entrepreneurial companies in Europe, Asia and South America are putting global markets into their business plans, and some of them are gunning for you.
In Monaco, I paid special attention to attendees from non-traditional business markets. I met with entrepreneurs from China, Estonia and the Czech Republic (in addition to Canada and Britain), because I was eager to learn how capitalism and entrepreneurship have sprung from Communist roots.
What I learned is that innovation is not confined to Canada and the United States, and that new ideas and breakthrough customer service can come to life anywhere in the world. This is important, because many Canadians assume the only thing developing markets have going for them is low costs. That’s no longer true, and there’s a growing cadre of ambitious entrepreneurs who can leverage value-added innovations and service on top of their low-wage advantage — a one-two punch that will become increasingly lethal as these young firms gain confidence and global clout.
Here’s a quick recap of some of the entrepreneurs I met.
— Dr. Ma Weihua had a promising career as a mandarin at China’s central bank when he decided to take an entrepreneurial flyer. He took over management of China Merchants Bank, which had the advantage of being one step removed from state ownership. Starting with one branch in 1999, he built mainland China’s sixth largest commercial bank, with assets north of $500-billion.
How’d he do it? Unlike most of his state-owned rivals, he asked, what would customers like us to do? As a result, he pioneered in online banking, credit cards, wealth management, and even small-business lending. He’s just now retiring, because he thinks the bank should be run by younger people who understand today’s mobile consumers.
— Frantisek Piskanin was working on a collective farm in the Czech Republic when its Communist government imploded in 1989. He now runs one of central Europe’s largest transportation and logistics companies, HOPI sro, with 3,300 employees. He carved his own path from the beginning; when he was hired by German retailer Tengelmann to facilitate the company’s imports into the Czech Republic, he confidently told the company that Czechs wanted to buy Czech goods, and began sourcing them on his client’s behalf. HOPI’s value-add services include taking control of clients’ inventory, from point of production to store shelf, and revolutionizing the meat industry by building new freezer facilities across Central Europe. He explains his customer-first strategy very succinctly; “We try to understand customers’ needs and bring them new solutions they had no idea could exist.”
— In Estonia, as you read in last week’s column, medical doctor Ruth Oltjer built a successful cleaning supplies and cosmetics firm, Chemi-Pharm. Chemi-Pharm began as a means to import less allergenic cleaning products from the U.K. following Communism’s fall, but is now a manufacturer that exports 50% of its production. Oltjer is eyeing markets in Asia and Western Europe, and is in talks with Mexico, which she hopes will lead to a frontal assault on North America.
— Even the 2013 World Entrepreneur of the Year fits the category of unlikely global entrepreneurs. Hamdi Ulukaya was born in Eastern Turkey and moved to the United States to learn English and study business. He ended up buying an unwanted Kraft cheese plant in upstate New York and revamping it to produce strained Greek yogurt. The Chobani brand has come from nowhere to be the No. 1 yogurt in the U.S.
But Ulukaya is just getting started. He has bought a factory in Australia and plans to enter the U.K. and Western Europe markets when a facility becomes available (finding the right plant is “an opportunistic thing,” he says). You may be interested to know Ulukaya first tried to build a plant in Canada. He found the perfect site and started drawing up plans, he says regulations prevented him from moving forward.
Ironic. While Canada holds on to protectionist rules, the rest of the world is charging forward.
These entrepreneurs may be the best of the best. But I’m betting there will be many more like them, bursting out of every corner of the world, driven by an urge to succeed and a vision of how different markets could be.
Are Canadian entrepreneurs ready for this kind of competition? Do they possess the vision to see things as they could be, not as they are? Do they have the courage to create what Piskanin calls “massive long-term savings” for their customers? Are they as committed to innovation as Dr. Ma, who stepped down because he thinks in-depth customer understanding is the most important asset a company has?
Entrepreneurs across the globe are thinking bigger and seeing further. To join them, you have to ask:
What could your business be? How could it leverage its key strengths to create massive value? What adjacent markets (products or geography) could you expand into? To quote Piskanin one more time, “If you don’t grow, you die.”
I’m not sure how many Canadian entrepreneurs really believe that. But they had better start, and soon.
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